How to recognize someone who doesn’t understand statistics, lesson one. The fact that people who have committed more serious crimes have also committed crimes against animals by no means indicates a causal relationship between the two. All it does is tell us that cruel people have always been cruel, or that unsympathetic people have always been unsympathetic, or that sociopaths have always been sociopaths or however you’d prefer to phrase it. What the author does not present here is the number of people who were convicted of animal cruelty AND THEN went on to commit more serious crimes.
All that these statistics can actually indicate is that cruelty toward animals and cruelty toward people are, to varying degrees, symptoms of being the kind of person who commits violent crime. Whether the underlying cause is something independent (genes, upbringing, hormones, whatever) or some kind of “gateway crime” is impossible to determine from this trifling analysis.
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